Roger S. Bagnall

Nicola Aravecchia

Olaf E. Kaper

Paola Davoli

Susanna McFadden

Raffaella Cribiore

Scattered through the vast expanse of stone and sand that makes up Egypt’s Western Desert are several oases. These islands of green in the midst of the Sahara owe their existence to springs and wells drawing on ancient aquifers. In antiquity, as today, they supported agricultural communities, going back to Neolithic times but expanding greatly in the millennium from the Saite pharaohs to the Roman emperors. New technologies of irrigation and transportation made the oases integral parts of an imperial economy. Amheida, ancient Trimithis, was one of those oasis communities. Located in the western part of the Dakhla Oasis, it was an important regional center, reaching a peak in the Roman period before being abandoned. Over the past decade, excavations at this well-preserved site have revealed its urban layout and brought to light houses, streets, a bath, a school, and a church. The only standing brick pyramid of the Roman period in Egypt has been restored. Wall-paintings, temple reliefs, pottery, and texts all contribute to give a lively sense of its political, religious, economic, and cultural life. This book presents these aspects of the city’s existence and its close ties to the Nile valley, by way of long desert roads, in an accessible and richly illustrated fashion.

An Oasis City

Tutu (Tithoes) was a popular god in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history, with his origins in the earlier Egyptian religious tradition. The god provided protection against demons, and his appearance as a striding sphinx was often combined with symbols of his power and visual references to demons and other divinities. The god Tutu demonstrates the continuing vitality of the pharaonic religion under the pressure of foreign cultures and ideas. This monograph provides the first comprehensive study of the god Tutu. It is based upon a collection of attestations, largely unpublished, which derive from monuments in various parts of Egypt and from museum collections all over the world. Moreover, the results of recent archaeological field work in Shenhur and in the temple of Tutu in the Dakhla Oasis have been included in full. The catalogue of monuments is accompanied by an analysis of the god Tutu, his iconography and his place in the Egyptian religion.

A Study of the Sphinx-god and Master of Demons with a Corpus of Monuments

The Egyptian God Tutu

Prisse d'Avennes

E. Prisse D'Avennes

An enchanted tour of Egyptian art by one of its early explorers: Prisse d'Avennes produced one of the most beautiful modern works on ancient Egyptian art. His monumental work, first published in Paris over a ten-year period between 1868 and 1878, includes the only surviving record of many lost artifacts.

Atlas of Egyptian Art

Wolf Schijns

Joris Kila

More than one third of the world's population lives in houses made of unfired earth bricks or stamped earth, materials also known as mud brick, adobe, terre crue, pisé, or rammed earth. Houses in the middle east have been made out this material for at least 10,000 years, but in many places this form of architecture is slowly being superceded by more recent building techniques using reinforced concrete and concrete blocks. This study contains a description of the remaining mud brick architecture in several villages in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt. It includes a brief history of mud brick, a discussion of the distinct local building techniques of the Oasis, and three architectural case studies of traditional mud brick houses in the Oasis, and it has many plans and photographs of local houses. The study was carried out as preparation for the design and construction of an archaeological working and training centre in the Dakhleh Oasis, which has been made according to the local traditions in mud brick vernacular. It is based on a field trip carried out in 1997 by Wolf Schijns (architect), Margriet Schijns (architect), Olaf E Kaper (Egyptologist) and Joris D Kila (art historian).

Olaf E. Kaper

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